The Isolation Journals - Day 64

Prompt:  Think about a time when you really hurt someone you love. What did it take for them to forgive you? In retrospect, how would you carry the burden of their pain better? Write a letter detailing the internal process you imagine they went through to arrive at a place of forgiveness and tell them how you will strive to carry their pain alongside them until it is resolved. If it feels right, consider sharing this letter with them.

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I have a skewed and problematic relationship with guilt.  I feel bad about everything if I think on it long enough.  I feel like I have to apologize for existing.  I know I have legitimately hurt people I love with my choices, my carelessness, my words.  I'm very lucky that the people in my life are gracious enough to forgive.  

This has been a heavy week for everyone, and I'd prefer not to delve into something overly complicated and personal.  It would feel like picking a scab and come across as unintentionally passive aggressive.  So instead, here's something intentionally passive aggressive:

Dearest Andy,

 Where do you find the grace to withstand the ways I torment you?  I hurt you every day, and every day you dust yourself off and we move on.

I know what you need, and I deny you.  I get off on being withholding.  Like kicking sand in the mouth of a desert wanderer, you ask for steak and I give you tofu.  You ask for brownies and I bake them with black beans.  You ask for wine, and I buy the one on the lowest shelf at Aldi.

A genuine apology is followed with a change in actions.  Yet I apologize to you only to befoul your existence with my vegetarian frugality.  Over and over again.  How do you find it in your heart to forgive me?  Is it meditation?  A philosophical acceptance that all life is suffering?  Is it through passive aggressive retaliation, like when you treat the dryer like your personal dresser drawer until I evict (and fold) your clean, wrinkled clothes so I can do other laundry?  Or how you eat those sourdough pretzels that shatter all over the couch?

But look, I carry the pain of deprivation with you.  I love a greasy strip of bacon as much as the next guy.  I'm eating a plateful of scrapple and pork roll on my death bed.  So I understand the pain I'm causing you.  Causing both of us.  We are doing the best we can.

Love,
Katie